Passings

In “Let Us Create More Revolutionary Films Based on Socialist Life,” a whopping 28-page talk, Kim sounds like a contemporary U.S. critic dissing Avatar’s plot as a Dances With Wolves ripoff: “As I pointed out some time ago, the new script in which you made the hero a shoemaker has a similar story to that of the feature film The Girl Barber, and there is also nothing particularly new in what the writer wants to say….As a matter of fact, this work differs little from The Girl Barber in theme, plot and mood. The only difference is that the barber, the heroine in The Girl Barber, has been replaced by a shoemaker as the hero.”

—From a piece I wrote on Kim Jong Il last year at Moving Image Source.

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I live alone, wear odds and ends, I have resisted vegetarianism and I don't keep cats." —Neaera H., in Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary

The New Catalogue of Metaphors

A while back, I wrote in the L.A. Times:

What are metaphors for? Before finding fame as the 20th century's greatest compiler and theorist of weird news, not to mention one of its most audacious and influential autodidacts, Charles Fort (1849-1932) was a journalist and pulp-story writer who amassed inventive ways to describe one thing in terms of something else. Among the few to glimpse these scraps was no less a literary titan than Theodore Dreiser, who was Fort's early magazine editor and steadfast champion. Bowled over, Dreiser offered to buy the odd collection from Fort. "They are better than any thesaurus," he raved, "a new help to letters."

And...........this sort of demands to be its own blog, but I was thinking, why not set down, here, in the spirit of Fort, a New Catalogue of Metaphors? By which I also mean simple old great similes.

Let's kick it off with one from Russell Hoban's Turtle Diary:

1. The bench was empty, the square was green and vacant in the early light like one long uninflected vowel.